The Land [Hardcover]

Antonio Torres (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1987

A modern classic of Brazilian literature recounting the tragedies of rural life in Brazil's arid back-lands.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"The land" is the harsh, decaying, poor backland of Bahia, Brazil, to which Nelo, the prodigal son of the Baiano family, returns after having made it big in Sao Paulo. But soon after his arrival, he commmits suicide, an act that shatters the family's faith and makes each person reconsider Nelo's legendary image and the hope represented by the checks he regularly sent home. For example, the "old man," who speculated and lost his crop and farm, laments his wife's newfangled ways and mourns the fact that his children must venture to the cities to succeed. The novel ends with the younger brother stepping out into a precarious urban world, full of the unanswered questions of a third-world country that is in transition.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 130 pages
• Publisher: Readers Intl; 1st English edition (February 1987)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0930523245
• ISBN-13: 978-0930523244
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,284,953 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A prodigal son returns home to confront his own legend, May 21, 2010

By 

D. Cloyce Smith (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Land (Hardcover)

"The Land" (1976; translated 1987) is a faint Brazilian echo of its African counterpart, Chinua Achebe's "No Longer at Ease." Both novels feature a village's favorite son who leaves home to make it big in the nearby metropolitan center; both deal with the decline of traditions from the continuing encroachment of modernization; both place the inevitable unhappy ending at the book's beginning.

But where Achebe's novel travels to the city with his protagonist, Torres's fiction stays in the village, with the family and neighbors young Nelo left behind. For the most part, we learn of Nelo's city adventures second-hand or not at all; much of his exploits are the stuff of legend. When a returning visitor hesitates with news of Nelo's stature, his father thinks, "It wasn't possible that anyone could come back from Sao Paulo and have nothing to say about Nelo . . . the impulsive one who'd gone away but made good." But in fact the traveler had seen Nelo only once, many years before, drunk and causing trouble in a bar where he was no longer welcome. So, in the book's opening pages, Nelo returns home full of swagger and empty of pocket.

The rural location of novel also informs the style of the storytelling. Although much of the story is told through the eyes of Nelo's brother, who knew his older idol almost entirely by reputation and myth, Torres constantly switches the point of view and freely mixes the prose style, weaving folklore, local chatter, and neighborhood phantoms with reminiscences of various characters. The end result, an initially puzzling narrative with shifting perspectives, belies the simplicity of the prose and dialogue, but the patient reader will quickly sort it out. (In this respect, the opening chapters, not to mention the focus on the coffin, remind me, unexpectedly, of "As I Lay Dying.") The tale of the prodigal son has perhaps become a bit stale over the centuries, but the language and structure of "The Land" lends originality to Torres's modernist version.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Unmemorable, June 22, 2003

By 

richard_t "richard_t" (Overseas) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Land (Hardcover)

Torres' 1997 novel is about the return of Nelo, the alienated prodigal son, to his home in Brazil's tough Bahia backland. It reads the same as Torres' earlier book "Blues for a Lost Childhood". Same story of angst-filled roots, brother-figure's death, father issues. This one is set against Bahia's hopeless interior instead of Brazil's 1964 military coup, but it offers little new to readers. There are occasionally interesting turns of phrase, but there are also passages that are more about the writer's whimsy than the structure of the novel or the reader's benefit. Thoroughly unmemorable, I've read my last Torres novel.